As well as regularly posting on social media and putting everything in place to boost your Google ranking, it may also be worth paying for advertising to increase traffic and gain potential customers.
Facebook and Google are the major traffic drivers for websites and there are a number of different advertising options for budgets large or small.
Using these platforms to advertise allows websites to pinpoint their target audience through information as accurate as age, interests and location.
Advertising on Google
Google advertising options include:
Adwords – paid advertising that appears when related search terms are looked up.
Display Ads – feature an image or animated graphic and appear on websites across Google’s network.
YouTube – video advertising.
On Google, sponsored links are given prominence in search results relating to keywords and appear higher up the page rankings.
Google provides a comprehensive guide to advertising across its platforms, which is a great place to get started.
Advertising on Facebook
The most common advertising on Facebook appears as a post within the newsfeed of the target audience. The main options are:
Link click ad – link to your website and promote likes for your Facebook page. They can feature video or still images.
Boosted post – a standard social media post that you can put money behind to reach a targeted audience. It will be labelled ‘sponsored’.
Carousel adverts – promote multiple products through rotating links under a main post.
Dynamic product adverts – appear in news feeds according to recently viewed products.
Boosting a post is a great way to get started as it is relatively inexpensive and straightforward.
This guide offers a comprehensive insight into all aspects of Facebook advertising. Facebook also makes the process as easy as possible via its advice page.
How much will it cost?
On Facebook it could cost just a few pence to generate a click – the more you pay to boost a post, the more results (be it page likes, website traffic or lead generation etc.) it will ideally generate by reaching a larger audience.
Google works on a pay-per-click basis, where the advertiser pays for each click on a link generated by a keyword that you have ‘bid’ on. This is based on the popularity of the keyword and can cost from 20p per click right up to £50 per click, depending on the business and its key search criteria.
As well as online help pages, there are specialist marketing agencies (including Red Box) that can manage your social media presence and take care of advertising. Maintaining a strong online presence can be very time consuming on top of managing a business so it may pay to bring in outside help.
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